Luis Valdez is considered the father of Chicano theater. He has distinguished himself as an actor, director, playwright, and, most recently, a filmmaker. It was, however, his role as the founding director of El Teatro Campesino, a theater group of farmworkers in California, that inspired young Chicano activists across the country to use theater as a means of organizing students, communities, and labor unions through a format created by Valdez, the acto (skit). Valdez and El Teatro Campesino explored wide-ranging themes of Mexican-American life, including the rebirth of pre-Columbian art and thought in the Southwest. This exploration led to Valdez's creation of the mito (myth), inspired by Amerindian dance drama, as a Chicano theatrical genre. Unlike the acto, the mito was not successfully adopted by the politically active and progressively radical Chicano theaters in the Southwest. The mito and Valdez's mystical indigenism--as exemplified in the ending of one...